A surprisingly complex, well-crafted story—much deeper than the average baseball memoir.
A journalist turned Little League commissioner reflects on the role of his son’s team in their lives and their community.
Los Angeles Magazine senior writer Katz was never interested in the glitz or glamour of Los Angeles. A transplant from Oregon, he started as a gang reporter, immersed himself in rough immigrant neighborhoods and, most transformingly, married the local barmaid, an illegal Nicaraguan immigrant with a son she hadn’t seen in years. Though the marriage didn’t last, it produced Max, around whom Katz’s world revolves. From the time Max could walk, the author took him to La Loma, the local park in colorful Monterey Park, and Little League became a major part of their lives. The league—mostly Mexican kids in an Asian-dominated neighborhood—was riddled with problems, from a lack of equipment to delinquent parents, but it was everything to Katz and his son. So important, in fact, that when the league started to unravel, Katz stepped in, putting his career on hold to serve as the commissioner. The Little League years weren’t easy. Katz watched his immigrant stepson struggle, his marriage dissolve and his mother, a prominent Oregon politician, succumb to cancer. But the author also built deep roots in the community and allowed himself to fall in love again, all while trying to create a safe, nurturing environment for Max. Katz’s writing is warm but admirably unsentimental. Even at the most clichéd moments—like when Max, a burgeoning teenager, eschewed Little League for skateboarding and girls—Katz takes it in stride. The bond between the author and his son is touching, but the real story is the community as a whole, and how, as an outsider, Katz came to have such a very natural role in it.
A surprisingly complex, well-crafted story—much deeper than the average baseball memoir.Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-307-40711-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2009
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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